And there was never a set list or a ticket charge. Or a ticket, for that matter.

See, musical Nashville is special, in large part because so many world-class musicians live within an easy drive of each other. And musicians are special.

They like what they do for a living, to the point that they’ll do it for pleasure. Plumbers don’t gather on Sundays to plumb for fun. Accountants don’t have number-crunching parties. But in Nashville, for many years, musicians gathered at the Belmont Boulevard home of famed producer Cowboy Jack Clement and at the Franklin Pike home of bluegrass legend Earl Scruggs and his wife, Louise, to laugh and smile and eat and play music.

These gatherings were joyful and casual, which is a good thing: Had they carried a whiff of formality, they would have been of terrifying weight. We’re talking about the greatest of the great, in unique conjunctions, playing together. Spouses, children and friends were invited, but the goal wasn’t to entertain the nonmusicians in attendance. There really wasn’t any goal at all. Just being together was mission accomplished.

The athletic equivalent might be the 1992 U.S. Olympic “Dream Team” scrimmages, where Michael Jordan, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, Charles Barkley and other future Hall of Famers went up against each other away from television cameras. But even that was competition. These Nashville gatherings were fellowship, not gamesmanship.

As for a rock ’n’ roll equivalent, there’s probably not one.

There’s a good documentary called “Festival Express” about a train tour that featured The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, The Band and others. But even there, performers were being paid to be on that train. Levon Helm’s “Midnight Ramble” shows at his Woodstock, N.Y., home were joyful confluences, but tickets were sold and the musicians were (rightly) interested in pleasing an audience.

Johnny and June Carter Cash used to host “guitar pulls” at their Hendersonville home, where Kris Kristofferson, Mickey Newbury, Joni Mitchell, George Hamilton IV, Gordon Lightfoot and many other writers came for music and hospitality.

John Hartford’s home on the banks of the Cumberland was home to epic New Year’s jams, and it may be that other groundbreaking musicians opened their homes for such sessions. (I’m told that musicians don’t always invite journalists to their big shindigs, though that’s difficult to believe.)

So what can we do about all this?

Well, I just got an email about someone’s rich uncle who died in Nigeria: Apparently, this guy needs my account information so that the uncle’s millions can be deposited in my name. If all that works out, I’m going to buy late Country Music Hall of Famer Cowboy Jack’s house — which has an upstairs recording studio built by the great Mark Howard — and revive it as a creative center, using Cowboy Jack’s motto as a mission statement: “We’re in the fun business. If we’re not having fun, we’re not doing our job.” All I need is a little more than $1.28 million.

You, dear reader, may purchase the Scruggs home, which in the past was also owned by the late fellow Country Music Hall of Famers — and former spouses — George Jones and Tammy Wynette.

Listed at $3.5 million, it is a gorgeous, rambling estate with room enough to invite dozens of musicians over to convene and collaborate. There’s a big iron gate out front, and I used to get giddy just watching from my driver’s seat when the thing opened: Driving through that gate was like passing through the turnstile on opening day of baseball season.

I’m counting hard on that rich Nigerian uncle money coming through, but if the real estate stuff doesn’t work out for us, maybe we can open our own homes.

Maybe we can visit each other in person, rather than just checking in through social media. Maybe bring-your-own-booze becomes bring-your-own-instrument (though it’s not an either/or: Instrument cases have lots of booze-hiding compartments).

Maybe we turn our houses into Nashville’s greatest music venues, just for the fun of it. Just because we can. Just because we’re Nashville, and our houses sound better than the houses in Wichita. We’re in the fun business, and it’s time to get to work.

Randy Scruggs, son of bluegrass legend Earl Scruggs, stands near a statue of his father at the Earl Scruggs Center in honor of his father during a tour that took place after the Earl Scruggs Center dedication ceremony at Central United Methodist Church on Saturday, Jan. 11, 2014 in Shelby, N.C. (photo: Associated Press / The Star, Ben Earp)

In his 88 years, Earl Scruggs found a new way to play the banjo, an instrument that was clattering toward antiquity until he gave it a new and eloquent voice.

In so doing, Scruggs helped create a new form of country music now recognized as “bluegrass,” he inspired thousands of players and millions of songs and he altered the course of American popular music.

Now, a year and 10 months after his death, Scruggs and his singular legacy are helping to rejuvenate the once-decaying uptown square in Shelby, N.C., the town where he worked making sewing thread in the Lily Mill, and where he left in 1945 to head west — first to Knoxville, then to Nashville — to fulfill his destiny.

Click for photo gallery: Bobby Bare, Kenny Rogers and Cowboy Jack Clement pose for pictures following the announcement of their induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame (photo: Samuel M. Simpkins/The Tennessean)

“A lot of things happened to me when I was in the fast lane that I took for granted and didn’t take the time to savor,” said Rogers, 74, who scored his first hit with 1969’s “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love To Town,” and who notched 21 No. 1 country songs and more than 50 million albums sold. “If this award had come at a time like that, I might have just said, ‘I’ve got the credentials, I deserve this’ and let it go. But this comes at a time when I can really stop and enjoy what this means.”

Rogers, Bare and Clement’s credentials are varied and unassailable.

Elected by Country Music Association voters in the “modern era” category, Rogers was a gravel-voiced commercial kingpin whose popularity spread beyond country and into pop and cinema environs. His hits include “The Gambler,” “Coward Of The County,” “Daytime Friends” and “Lucille.”

Elected in the “veteran” category, the 78-year-old Bare’s eclectic and varied way of delivering songs made him an enduring favorite who championed ace songwriters Shel Silverstein, Kris Kristofferson, Tom T. Hall and Billy Joe Shaver and who kick-started country music’s “Outlaw Movement” of the 1970s with his self-produced 1973 album “Bobby Bare Sings Lullabys, Legends and Lies.”

Clement was elected as a “non-performer,” though he’s spent decades as a performing and recording artist. He produced brilliant works for Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, Charley Pride and many more; he published songs including “She Thinks I Still Care”; he brought Pride to popular attention and desegregated country music in the process; he convinced Kristofferson to move to Nashville in the 1960s; he schooled studio proteges including Garth Fundis, Allen Reynolds and Jim Rooney; he arranged Cash’s “Ring of Fire”; he opened the first professional-grade home recording studio in Nashville; and he earned a reputation as a grinning sage of Music City.

The Dixie Chicks perform at the Bi-Lo Center on May 1, 2003, in Greenville, S.C., on the opening night of their tour of the United States. "We have a plan for this," lead singer Natalie Maines said after the band's first set. "If you're here to boo, we welcome that. We're going to give you 15 seconds to do that." And when Maines counted to three, the sold-out crowd erupted in cheers and the Chicks broke into "Long Time Gone." (Photo: Tennessean file - AP Photo/WireImage, Rick Diamond, HO)

The Chicks had sued their record company, Sony, claiming they hadn’t been properly compensated for all those albums sold, and they’d settled that lawsuit out of court. They’d gone to Texas and made an excellent, accomplished, acoustic-based, bluegrass-informed album, produced by Maines’ steel guitar-playing father, Lloyd Maines.

The album, called “Home,” sounded nothing like anything else being played on country radio, but the Chicks were powerful enough that country stations felt like they had to play the music.

The first single on “Home,” released via the Chicks’ aptly named Sony imprint, Open Wide Records, was a jaunty acoustic number called “Long Time Gone” that included this rumination on how country radio had grown lousy: “Listen to the radio to hear what’s cookin’ but the music ain’t got no soul,” Maines sang.

A lead single that criticized the very stations that would be playing it? Yes, sure. Did they play it? Absolutely. Big hit.

They also played follow-up single “Landslide,” a contemplative version of an old Fleetwood Mac song. The third single was “Travelin’ Soldier,” a down-tempo lament set in the Vietnam War era, about a tragic love affair between a high school girl and a soldier. Radio, perhaps grudgingly, ate it up.

So the most popular act in country music was working outside the lines, skirting the system and winning at every turn. Then, on March 10, 2003, the Chicks played a show in London, at the same time U.S. troops were preparing to go to war in Iraq, hoping to avenge the 9/11 attacks and to find weapons of mass destruction.

Click to see a gallery of the 2012 BMI Country Awards (this photo of Kenny Chesney: Dipti Vaidya/The Tennessean)

Country stars, hit songwriters and living music legends gathered in Nashville on Tuesday night to salute one another at the 60th annual BMI Country Awards.

Songwriters Dallas Davidson and Luke Laird shared one of the evening’s top honors, as both were named songwriters of the year. The two each contributed five of the performing rights organization’s most-performed country songs of the year, including “Country Girl (Shake It for Me),” “A Little Bit Stronger,” “We Owned the Night” and “Take a Back Road.”

“Take a Back Road,” which Laird wrote with 2011 songwriter of the year Rhett Akins, was named song of the year.

“These last few years have been really special,” Laird told The Tennessean on Tuesday night. “I feel like as a writer, I get better every year, but this last year, I’ve been fortunate to work with a lot of artists that I’m fans of, as well as other songwriters. I’ve had just enough success that I get to work with more people that I really want to be working with, so I feel really blessed.”

“Back Road” was a No. 1 hit for Rodney Atkins, who said he couldn’t stop replaying the first recording the songwriters gave him.

“It had everything,” Atkins said. “It became something that once we released it, instantly, emails started coming in by the thousands, with people saying that it made them feel differently. It lifted their spirits. It was their get in their right state of mind to go to chemotherapy treatments, dealing with cancer, dealing with losing their job, going through tough times. Those are the songs I love, that are anthems about real life.”

“I came to this town for one reason,” Brooks said on the red carpet just inside the hall’s doors. “That was to get George Strait to record ‘Much Too Young (To Feel This Damn Old).’ Tonight, he’s singing it.”

“I’m going to try to set a record drinking this much moonshine in a three-minute song,” Dunn joked, holding a mason jar of clear liquid, before he launched into a version of George Jones’ “White Lightning,” the first song on which Robbins professionally played.

The 2012 BMI Country Awards will hardly be Hall’s first — the singer has won a total of 31 BMI Awards and met his wife, Dixie, at the BMI Country Awards in 1965. The couple has been married for 44 years.

Click here to see a photo gallery of Earl Scruggs through the years. Here, he waits in his dressing room at the Ford Theatre at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum before going on stage (Photo: John Partipilo/The Tennessean).

Country Music Hall of Famer Earl Scruggs, a singular talent of collective impact, died Wednesday morning at a Nashville hospital. He was 88 and died of natural causes.

A quietly affable presence, Mr. Scruggs popularized a complex, three-fingered style of playing banjo that transformed the instrument, inspired nearly every banjo player who followed him and became a central element in what is now known as bluegrass music.

But Mr. Scruggs’ legacy is in no way limited to or defined by bluegrass, a genre that he and partner Lester Flatt dominated as Flatt & Scruggs in the 1950s and ’60s: His adaptability and open-minded approach to musicality and to collaboration made him a bridge between genres and generations.

Rather than speak out about the connections between folk and country in the war-torn, politically contentious ’60s, he simply showed up at folk festivals and played, at least when he and Flatt weren’t at the Grand Ole Opry. During the long-hair/short-hair skirmishes of the ’60s and ’70s, he simply showed up and played, with Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and The Byrds. And when staunch fans of bluegrass — a genre that would not exist in a recognizable form without Mr. Scruggs’ banjo — railed against stylistic experimentation, Mr. Scruggs happily jammed away with sax player King Curtis, sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar, piano man Elton John and anyone else whose music he fancied.

“He was the man who melted walls, and he did it without saying three words,” said his friend and acolyte Marty Stuart in 2000.